


dead sea

by autoclaves



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Canon Asexual Character, Depression, Established Relationship, M/M, Pining, food as a metaphor for tenderness, or alternatively: post-159 pre-s5 missing scene, references to various symptoms of depression + very mild suicide ideation, yes they're in a relationship yes they're still pining that's just what jm is LIKE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:55:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23889325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoclaves/pseuds/autoclaves
Summary: Somewhere in the middle of this glitching mindscape, a person that Martin would like to believe is his real self cries for it to stop. This self is still alive, just—inaccessible. Quietly pigeonholed into the attic, quarantined under floorboards like a bad secret.Is there a way back home? Is there a way back to you?he thinks, blindly. There is no answer, or at least, none that he can hear. Depression, in its slow and imperceptible way, continues to take up residence inside of him.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 13
Kudos: 92





	dead sea

**Author's Note:**

> check the endnotes for warnings re: depression! 
> 
> i wrote all of this in a single day while in a sleep-deprived haze and it was a ride folks,,,, i listened to 159 and cried real actual tears about the lonely and decided to project my entire brain onto martin. this is technically a non-powered au because that's just how i imagined it, but i guess there's nothing to keep you from slotting it into canon?

Martin wakes up, and doesn’t want to. This is always how it starts—the creeping fog, the wretched emptiness, the realization that he can no longer find a single reason to go through the motions of living again. It’s a slow descent. He can feel himself slipping back into that bad place again, and he is both aggressor and spectator in his passivity. On these days, he doesn’t think he can be a person even if he wants to. 

(It had started the previous evening when the sun sank down. It’s so  _ lonely _ out at nightfall. To look outside and see nothing else, only pinpricks of solitary light in the distance, to be the only known quantity in a sea of darkened glass. It was like the slow fade into night had bled something loose inside him.) 

That had been a different kind of void, though. Less illness, more sadness, a sheet of blunt-edged melancholia. This raw, record-scratch morning is far less quantifiable and infinitely worse.

Radio static in his head. He is in so many pieces. It’s hard to keep himself together when the sun has fallen right off the edge of the world and his body now feels like the unwanted inhabitant of a car crash; no, nothing quite so violent and screaming as that. A haunted house, maybe. A muffled crime scene before its investigation.

Somewhere in the middle of this glitching mindscape, a person that Martin would like to believe is his real self cries for it to stop. This self is still alive, just—inaccessible. Quietly pigeonholed into the attic, quarantined under floorboards like a bad secret.  _ Is there a way back home? Is there a way back to you? _ he thinks, blindly. There is no answer, or at least, none that he can hear. Depression, in its slow and imperceptible way, continues to take up residence inside of him.

It seems so unreasonable, but he can’t bear to even lift his head. He’s just so tired.

Outside is a riotous spring, green and pink and yellow. Last fall, when the cold set in and winter rusted shut its grip around them, he’d wanted it to be spring so badly that he would have given up anything to see it happen. A hand, an eye. A lung, even. The nights had been so long and aching then. Now, the days are, too. Outside is spring and Martin is acutely aware that it is passing him by.

Time distorts strangely when he’s like this. He wakes from the blink of a sleep-sick nap to find the sun burning too high above him, and the door creaking open; a rattle of keys being set down, plastic grocery bags rustling onto the kitchen counter, and Jon’s quick footsteps walking down the hallway. 

“Martin?” he hears Jon call. “Martin? I’ve got the shopping but we should really see if—”

Their bedroom door opens, the noise of it interrupting whatever he had been about to say. It’s a little darker in here with the blinds half-turned, but not dark enough that he wouldn’t be able to see Martin lying curled on the bed. 

“Martin?” he repeats, more quizzically this time.

“Jon,” Martin says. His voice is raspy from disuse, so he tries again. “Jon. Hello.”

Jon draws nearer. “Is this a bad day?” He is windswept and smells like sunlight, like the springtime he’d just been outside in, and Martin can hardly bear to look at him for envy of what he wants to be. What he couldn’t be if he tried because he is barely a person right now. But that isn’t Jon’s fault, he reminds himself very carefully. Jon is trying to take care of him. (His expression has not changed in the slightest after seeing Martin motionless on the bed, all the blankets pulled up despite how mild the day is, and he is silently thankful for it. He knows what a miserable picture this must make.)

“Yeah,” he manages. “Do you—can you… come here? Please.”

“Of course.” There’s a sweep of air, and the bed dips; Jon sliding in between the sheets unquestioningly at his appeal even though the day is in its prime and it’s only Martin’s brain being irrational and happiness-deprived. 

It takes a minute, but they shift so that they’re facing each other, bodies only a few inches apart on the mattress. Martin can feel the difference of a second presence and the warmth it exudes. He can feel himself reaching for it, too, with his half-starved self. A puzzle piece, or a stray bracket looped inwards.

“Can I touch you?” 

Martin nods. He desperately wants Jon to touch him. He needs to be reminded that he’s real, and that he hasn’t just made this up in his mind as a respite from the echoing wasteland of the sadness. Jon is real, and that means Martin is more than a single lonely blot on the horizon.

“Okay,” Jon whispers, and doesn’t ask anything more of him. Soon enough, Martin feels hands skim the backs of his wrists, glide up his forearms and across his shoulders. They trace the pattern of freckles on his chest, forwards and backwards. Light, undemanding touches, so quintessentially  _ Jon _ in their repetitive familiarity. Eventually, he pulls him closer so that their bodies are pressed against each other in a sort of half-hug: Martin’s head tucked into the bend of Jon’s chin, one of Jon’s legs draped over his hip, their torsos a single warm line from collarbone to stomach. Jon is normally so much smaller than him, and all rangy and bird-boned to boot, but when he gets like this, his presence is expansive, comforting. Martin feels lazily enveloped in it. The whole bed smells like Jon now, aftershave and rooibos tea and something citrusy—oranges, maybe. 

He lies carefully still in familiar arms, and he thinks he should feel something more about this. He thinks he should feel happier, or more grateful. It’s not that he’s not, exactly, more that he’s just… temporarily divorced from it. As if he’s looking at the feeling, or the implication of it, from a point very distant at the edge of the sky. There’s something in the way that makes it hard to directly feel anything. He is looking at the happiness of someone else’s body, and then back down at the happiness-shaped imprint on his own. The place where happiness is supposed to be, but isn’t, right now. 

He tells Jon this. “I think I should feel something about this. I think I should feel something about you right now. It isn’t right that I don’t.”

(He just feels so  _ hollow. _ He didn’t know absence could take up so much space inside a person. Right now, he is a tenant in his own head.)

“You don’t owe me anything, Martin,” Jon says, the steady vibration of words in his throat humming through the top of Martin’s skull. That sensation, the intimacy of it, is the closest Martin thinks he has gotten to feeling something today. 

“I love you. You don’t have to answer that right now, but I just wanted you to know. When you come back, I’ll tell you again. As many times as you want.” The light stretches and slants as Jon speaks.

Martin is sometimes afraid that there is no  _ back. _ There is no returning. It really does seem like this is all there is, this static on a broken loop and his mind slowing like the drip of a hospital IV. If that is true, then it’s not Jon, or even the feeling of happiness that is unreal;  _ Martin  _ is the imposter here. The magic trick, the illusion, the Eurydice caught between person and not. There is nowhere to go back to, because the emptiness is the only part of him that means anything.

(“I love you,” Jon had tried, over and over, achingly, the first time it happened, and finally Martin had screamed at him,  _ “I love you  _ can’t solve this, Jon!” They’d had a long conversation that night about love and illness and how sometimes he was so numb he could die from it. Since then, Jon only says the words because they are true, not as if they could save Martin. It might seem uncaring to anyone else, but it works for the both of them.)

_ I love you, _ Jon says now, like a fact, and Martin wants to say it back, he really does. 

The figure in his head, the one that he has to believe he can go back to, tries to say it. But even in the isolation of his own mind, it only comes out as a faint  _ I really loved you, you know.  _ He doesn’t mean for it to mangle like that, the past tense of it softly mocking. He still loves Jon—that much is not an illusion. That much is also a fact. It’s the apathy again, leaching the feeling out of his actions and his speech. There is an  _ I love you- _ shaped wound on his self and it is one he cannot quite reconcile with the love he knows he has for Jon.  _ I really loved you, you know. And the version of me that loves you, that  _ can _ love you, is still out there. Just not here. There’s all this untethered, inaccessible love here, Jon. I want to be able to feel it for you. _

Jon falls asleep for a while after that. He’s still clutching at Martin, the weight and anchor of his body a welcome warmth. Martin stays awake, so he looks at Jon to fill the time. 

Jon is rendered looser when he drowses. He’s more inexact somehow, edges less sharply defined and face slack, unreserved. It isn’t that he withholds on purpose, and especially not from Martin, but his defense mechanisms forget to reset themselves in sleep. It’s part of why sleeping next to him is an almost unbearable closeness all by itself—a reminder that he is trusted enough to see this. Martin reaches out with a hand, and is nearly startled when it brushes Jon’s face. He’d expected it to go right through him, for some reason. He isn’t sure whether he’d imagined himself or Jon to be the insubstantial one in this scenario, but in any case, his hand finds solid skin. 

He touches his fill of Jon’s angular cheeks and cradled shoulders and pinned dark hair. He’s so beautiful, all of him. Aftershave and rooibos and oranges; it feels like a foreign landscape, but Martin is determined. He is relearning the things that make up Jon the way a man deprived of senses does.

When Jon wakes up—in fits and starts, squinting at the sun that is now slouching golden across the room—Martin embraces him and very quietly says that he’ll start putting the groceries away. 

So they get out of bed together, even though Martin feels like he hasn’t walked in weeks. He lifts the bags off the counter to sit down and sort through them on the floor. It is the most human thing he’s done today.

Sorting is a quiet, menial sort of task that doesn’t require much thought, which is good, because his head is still weighted down with buzzing. He sits in the sunlight and lets the rice and orzo and tinned olives and fruit pass through his hands as he puts them on the shelves, thinking,  _ our food, our sunlit kitchen, this is the home we have made. (I really loved you, you know.  _ He can’t change the tense of it yet so he just repeats that word, _ love, _ until he can pretend to forget the context of it. No past, no future, just  _ love,  _ said like it would replace the emptiness.)

Afterwards, Jon makes them baked pasta with three different kinds of cheese. Evening paints the length of him glorious and blue. As Martin watches, he shreds thyme and basil and mixes breadcrumbs to cover the top layer the way Martin likes best; Jon, who is reasonably talented at yet notoriously opposed to the idea of cooking, does all this without batting an eye. Martin is sure he will feel something about this, too, later. 

**Author's Note:**

> content warning for depictions of depression, including experiences that can be interpreted as dissociation/depersonalization, anhedonia, emotional detachment, mild suicide ideation, etc. please lmk if there's anything you think should be added here!
> 
> sometimes you have a mental illness and somebody loves you and it still isn’t enough. not in a horrible or irreversible way, because at any other time it would be, but in the immediate face of depression it isn’t enough to make everything alright again, and this is a fic vaguely about that.
> 
> tumblr: @doctortwelfth  
> edit: you can now reblog the fic [here](https://doctortwelfth.tumblr.com/post/616792922298449920/dead-sea-the-magnus-archives-a-character-study)!


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